Yellowknife election 2026: Adrian Bell interview

Adrian Bell is seeking another term on Yellowknife City Council in this month’s municipal election, after previously serving two terms from 2012 to 2018.

Bell has lived in the North since he was five and in Yellowknife since he was eight. He has been a small business owner in downtown Yellowknife since he was 20 and has owned Century 21 Prospect Realty for the past 14 years, working as a commercial realtor and real estate broker.

According to Bell, he has also been involved in downtown revitalization, festivals and efforts to build an arts centre. He says Yellowknife is facing a period of significant growth and he wants council to be prepared to take advantage of coming investments while managing their impacts.

His campaign priorities include preparing for population growth, the cost of living, creating a more welcoming downtown and protecting Tin Can Hill.

Cabin Radio is aiming to interview all 21 candidates running for eight council seats. We have asked every candidate to list their four top priorities to guide those interviews.

Melissa Syer and Garett Cochrane are running for mayor. Cabin Radio hosted a mayoral candidates’ debate on October 5 at City Hall. You can watch the debate on Cabin Radio’s Facebook page or listen to it on Spotify.

Election day is October 19. Early voting began on October 5 and runs until October 16.

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This interview was recorded on October 2, 2026. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Ollie Williams: You have done this before. Why do you want to do it again?

Adrian Bell: Well, I enjoyed it. It’s an interesting thing, living in Yellowknife. When you get involved in stuff, you can make a difference.

It’s a time right now where I think we have incredible opportunities ahead of us, and I think we need a really strong council that can make important decisions quickly to set us up to be in a strong position to capitalize on coming investments and not get run over by them.

As a council, how do you help prepare Yellowknife for population growth in a way that the city isn’t already trying?

Well, trying is the key word there that I would focus on. That’s really subjective. You might think the city was trying six years ago when they adopted the last community plan, but that plan was the wrong plan. It was not a plan that could accommodate growth. I was involved with the Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce and for many years we were begging council to amend that plan because it really hampered our ability to be ready for something like this.

When an opportunity comes along and you’re faced with growth pressures, you have to have land available so you continue to have a homebuilding sector and you have a planning department accustomed to bringing land to market.

The plan adopted in 2020 took a very different approach and they stopped viewing things that way. As a result, we are not ready today. Now there is a new community plan but again, that plan was designed at a time when we didn’t really know the scope and scale of the investments that are coming our way.

It’s better than the old plan. It’s probably the plan we should have had in 2020, but it still is not adequate. There are insufficient options for bringing land to market, so it needs to be much more ambitious in my opinion.

If you were going to amend that plan, what are the key things to change?

To me, the land sequencing section. It’s not strategic enough. It basically says we’re going to do all the things all at once, and we’ve seen city administration cannot do that. They have limited resources.

They need to shift their focus to start with very large parcels. Once we’ve got those large parcels, once you’ve got an inventory and you’ve got the whole machine rolling, you can take a look at small parcels again. But you have to prioritize the use of your human resources and focus on those big parcels now, so we can be ready.

The cost of living is a tricky one for reasons that I think everyone acknowledges. We would all like cheaper bills, but very rarely does everyone agree on what to cut to get there. How are you proposing that the city addresses the cost of living without saying goodbye to services people rely on, or does there need to be some of that?

There may need to be some of that, but I think there are really two ways to bring costs down for the average Yellowknifer, and one is focused on the top line. New revenue, grow the tax base, bring in more taxpayers. So that’s one way. And then, of course, yes, the other way is to cut costs.

For me, because we are in this situation where we have to be ready for growth, I think the focus should be on growing the tax base, and that growth in the tax base brings many benefits, not just spreading out our property taxes. It also allows us to bring down the fixed costs of things like delivering power to Yellowknifers.

When you’ve got an aquatic centre that can accommodate 35,000 or 40,000 people, or a water treatment plant with that same capacity, but you’re running along at 22,000 people, it’s very expensive. You want to try to get those numbers up so you spread those costs out across more people.

Everyone is predicting growth over the medium to long term. Whether the numbers change that much over one council term, I don’t know. Is the message to Yellowknife residents that we need to prepare for this but actually for the next year, two, three years, there might not be much shift on the cost of living?

Certainly, it’s very hard to move the needle drastically. That is challenging. But there will be things that come up that people haven’t considered or aren’t aware of yet. Decisions about amenities or infrastructure that some folks will see as needs and others will see as wants.

I’ll give you one example. This hasn’t really been talked about much, but there is going to be a conversation about building a new City Hall. City Hall is an old building. It needs investment. Nobody really talks about that but it’s coming, and it’s going to have a big price tag.

To my mind, you want to have people who very closely scrutinize those types of projects and are able to say no to things that we just don’t think are needs. We have to take care of our assets. You can’t have buildings falling down around you, that’s irresponsible. So we have to invest in renovations. But there’s no reason, to my mind, that the city can’t be in other spaces around town besides City Hall – and in fact, we’ve seen it moving in that direction.

Creating a welcoming downtown is a thing that’s been around for decades. You have been on past councils where not a whole lot appeared to shift on that. Nobody seems to have figured it out. What are you proposing as an approach?

It’s pretty well understood that our downtown can be an uninviting place for tourists, for shoppers, for everyone. We’ve seen big steps taken by the GNWT – tens of millions of dollars invested in a new wellness centre, in transitional housing. That’s incredibly important, but we still have behaviour issues in the downtown.

We have aggressive behaviour that causes a problem, quite often when it’s combined with intoxication. We have to be very careful not to criminalize homelessness. I feel like people point the finger at a certain population, the homeless population, as a cause of the problem. To me, that’s a very, very small problem, and one that will be greatly improved by that wellness centre.

I feel like we’ve got a problem downtown with just a general acceptance of party-like behaviour from folks who choose to be there, who have homes and who simply find it to be a great place to hang out in great numbers on the weekend, and I think we can do something about that.

The “downtown ambassador proposal” would have workers in the downtown who have some security training, who can identify problems and work with municipal enforcement and the RCMP to bring resources to bear when they need to be brought to bear, and we can look at other cities and see what other solutions have worked.

The challenge, of course, is that addressing this issue requires multiple levels of government. The city is not in the housing business, and the city is not in the alcohol and drug counselling business or the mental health counselling business. Those have to be a part of the solution.

We have to hold their feet to the fire, but that doesn’t free us from the obligation to do what we can – and the one aspect of this, unfortunately, that the city is involved in, is public safety.

Let’s talk about Tin Can Hill. What do you perceive the threats to that to be right now, and what is your ambition for it in the medium to long term?

Before I jump into Tin Can Hill, I want to point out that we all have different city amenities we value or we view in different ways. To me, having grown up here and continuing to spend a lot of time outdoors, our trails and parks are our greatest amenity.

The one with the greatest potential, an incredible asset, is Tin Can Hill. It’s just become even greater with additional user groups over the last few years – in particular the fat bikers, who’ve shown people where a whole bunch of other trails can be, and they’ve really expanded what’s available there.

I think in the back of many folks’ minds, many folks who’ve been involved in planning at the city and thinking about the future, they’ve wanted to hold on to this possibility of developing it. That’s why I believe there was significant infrastructure brought up the hill there, to allow for future neighbourhood development, and it’s why even recently you’ve seen maps in city documents showing water and sewer lines running across Tin Can Hill.

The city did say very clearly, no, that’s not true.

It’s in the document. I think it’s pretty easy for somebody to take a look at that and say ‘OK, it looks like at some point somebody thought it was a good idea.’ It’s great that they’ve clarified that, and that’s wonderful.

The city said it’s going to try to keep all of that infrastructure pretty-much entirely off the hill now.

That’s a great sign. So if they have truly moved past it as a possibility for development, why not set it aside as a park, so it can actually be improved to some extent?

When my family comes to town, my parents come here, I can’t take them for walks on Tin Can Hill because it’s not accessible. The trails, with some modest improvements, could be an incredible amenity for a lot of Yellowknifers and that’s not going to happen unless you have designated it as some sort of park or protected area.

So I think that’s a logical step. If they have truly moved past it for development, that’s wonderful news and I can take it out of my platform. But I’ll truly believe it when I see it, and I’ll believe it when they go a step further and set it aside as a park.

Last time you were in here doing one of these interviews it was 2018, and you were running for mayor. Why didn’t you want to do that this time around?

I’m involved in some really interesting projects and I really enjoy my jobs. I’m a lot more focused now on a couple of key issues with the city. Getting us ready for what’s coming is a big part of it. I don’t want to have to set aside these other jobs.

I’m the executive director of a group that’s trying to build an art centre in town. That’s an incredible project, incredible opportunity, and I’m just not in a position to set that aside at this time.

In a field of 21 people going for these eight spots on council, what is it that you feel sets you apart in a way that voters should go for you?

I don’t think it sets me completely apart because I think there are some other councillors, both incumbents and new councillors, who are talking about the same priorities. But certainly if people are concerned about being ready for this population growth that’s coming, I would be one of the people I think they would look to.

Because I have had two terms’ experience on council, it won’t take me long to get up to speed. I am the kind of person who is prepared to have tough conversations. I think a lot of people already know where I stand on many things, and so they probably know what they’re getting if they vote for me.